Why you should abandon AVE metrics
It’s important to measure the impact of your message—but make sure you are using data that is valuable and informative.
Is it possible to ever fully measure earned media? Unfortunately, no.
Certain objectives may never be measurable, while others are easily tracked.
So why do PR pros and company executives continue to put weight behind bad metrics that align earned media efforts with ad campaigns?
The industry has moved beyond the days of interpreting PR success by measuring the total number of inches a story covers in a print publication. Yet, many professionals in the field continue to use outdated methods to justify the value of their efforts.
Most prominently, Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) remains unfortunately common.
What is AVE?
AVE stands for the practice of determining the success of an earned media placement by comparing it to the cost of an advertisement of a similar size.
For example, if your carefully crafted and well-timed pitch resulted in a quarter-page story in The New York Times, you would determine how much a quarter-page ad costs in that publication and attribute that potential ad cost as the value your story. This is how you would demonstrate value to your clients or bosses.
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